The Monmouth University Poll released Monday did not hold any good news for a certain New Jersey governor. Chris Christie finished 14th among candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He was favored by just 1 percent of potential Iowa caucus-goers.

The cut-off line for the big Fox News debate Aug. 6 is the top 10. This poll couldn't have come at a worse time for Christie.

But Christie did catch a break last week. The media largely ignored his big speech on criminal justice reform.

"It probably is good for him that it didn't get coverage," said poll director Pat Murray. "He did that on the same day as Obama's trip to a federal prison and you don't want to be seen offering similar proposals to the president."

Not in a Republican primary you don't. Yet that's what Christie did in his speech at a community center in Camden Thursday.

The program he proposed sounded a lot like what President Barack Obama pitched the same day. Both bemoaned the long sentences given to nonviolent drug offenders. Both proposed mandatory drug treatment as an alternative.

So far, so good. Both deserve credit for moving away from mass incarceration.

But one of them went even further. This guy proposed a vast new federal bureaucracy that would have say over every aspect of the lives of millions of Americans. And it wasn't Obama.

"I would nationalize the drug court system," Christie told a TV interviewer after the speech. The drug courts sentence users to treatment rather than jail.

It's usually Democrats who propose big new programs turning the nation into even more of a nanny state. But Christie argued federal intervention is needed because drug addiction is a disease.

"Addiction is something we should treat as the disease that it is," he said, throwing in the observation that "drug addiction is like cancer."

No, it isn't, at least not according to my favorite debunker of this nanny-state nonsense.

That's Stanton Peele. He's a psychologist from Morris County who's made a career out of challenging the drug-treatment establishment on that point.

"Disease theory denies that people get better on their own," Peele said.

But they do, he said, particularly presidents and presidential contenders. Obama has admitted to smoking lots of pot in his student days as has former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on the Republican side.

Peele's view is that such problems are better solved by societal rather than governmental intervention.

"What has been successful in substance abuse is basically having a social mechanism to control it," he said. "That's the opposite of disease theory.

That should be the conservative view - and was for most of the 20th century.

Peele noted that the federal government's intervention in drug policy traces back to a prior New Jersey governor became president, Democrat Woodrow Wilson. In 1914, the feds passed the Harrison Act, which imposed such strict taxes on cocaine and opiates that it amounted to de facto criminalization.

During Democrat Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal marijuana was outlawed. And then Republican Richard Nixon came along and started a "War on Drugs" that is now being repudiated by Democrats and Republicans alike.

The real problem with the drug war, said Peele, is that the feds never take into account the law of unintended consequences. The big marijuana crackdown of the Nixon era made it more profitable for smugglers to import cocaine and heroin. The heroin crackdown pushed people to drugs like Oxycontin that can be even more deadly. And so on.

Christie is running as the second coming of Nixon, which may explain his poor performance in the polls. Most of the other GOP contenders have migrated back to the traditional Republican belief in the states as "laboratories of democracy."

When it comes to marijuana, they repeat a refrain that goes like this:

"I personally oppose marijuana use. But the people of (insert state name here) should be free to run their state the way they want without federal interference."

Not Dr. Christie. He has pledged that if elected he would have all of those diseased people in places like Colorado treated by armed federal agents.

Christie has made a point of setting himself up as the opponent of the two Republicans who've been doing the most to restore the GOP to the pre-Nixon era. That's 2012 presidential contender Ron Paul and his son Rand, the Kentucky senator who's running for the 2016 nomination.

In 2012 Ron Paul, who is a real doctor, framed the debate nicely by asking "Why is it we can't put into our body whatever we want?"

Just for fun, let's apply that to food as well as drugs. The American Medical Association classifies obesity as a disease, one that kills about 300,000 Americans a year as opposed to roughly zero for marijuana.

If disease prevention is a legitimate federal goal, why should we not have federal agents patrolling the supermarkets the way they patrol the drug markets?

I for one would love to see Christie asked that question in a debate - assuming he ever gets into one.

And if like me you find that "addiction is a disease" argument to be profoundly silly, then read this essay from Peele:

People are much concerned about bad habits (which sometimes reach life-consuming proportions) that they'd like to do something about-drinking, smoking, overeating, taking drugs, gambling, overspending, or even compulsive romancing. We hear more and more that every one of these things is a disease, and that we must go to treatment centers or join twelve-step support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous in order to change any of these behaviors. Is there really no other way to change a powerful habit than to enter treatment for a disease? Do personal initiative, willpower, or just maturing and developing a more rewarding life have anything to do with people's ability to overcome addictive habits?

As children, as spouses, as parents, as employers, as consumers, and as citizens we must struggle to understand and master the destructive potential of drugs, alcohol, and related addictions. The kinds of questions so many people face today include: What do we do if we discover our children are smoking marijuana, or worse? Should we put them in a treatment center that will teach them they are chemically dependent for life? How can we tell if co-workers, employees, and friends are secretly addicts or alcoholics? What is the most appropriate way to react to people who drink too much or do anything that harms themselves and others?

Furthermore, as a society, how should we deal with these problems? Are our incessant wars on drugs really going to have the positive impact the generals in these wars always claim? Or is there some more sensible or direct way to reduce the damage people do to themselves through their uncontrollable habits? Rather than arrest drug users, can we treat addicts so that they stop using drugs? And if we expand the treatment for all the addictions we have seen--like shopping and smoking and overeating and sexual behavior--who will pay for all this treatment?